


water to the desert

by hinotorihime



Category: Rusty Quill Gaming (Podcast)
Genre: Character Study, Grief, Guilt, Sibling Rivalry, am i projecting? you fuckin bet, big families are complicated
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-30
Updated: 2019-06-30
Packaged: 2020-05-30 19:35:56
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,560
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19409977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hinotorihime/pseuds/hinotorihime
Summary: Here are the children, one two three four lined up neatly in a row: the twins weren't born yet, when you realized you hated her.They ask you to sing at her funeral.("You want the truth, Hamid? Until all ofthis, I was doing really well.")





	water to the desert

This is what happens when you get the news:

Mother collapses, like a marionette, strings severed sudden and neat, to the floor. Father stares stunned at the messenger, jaw twisting with unspoken words. Saleh gasps sobbing and wrecked aloud. Ishaak is silent, uncomprehending. Ismail is tugging at Father's sleeve, asking something you can't hear through the blood throbbing in your ears. Hamid isn't there. (Hamid is in Prague. Hamid was in Prague, with Aziza.)

You quietly excuse yourself and go into the garden to scream, and maybe hit things. You feel lightheadedly, soporifically traitorous.

Your own hypocrisy twists in your gut, as if she'd taken the poker to it, with that broad, condescending smile.

Here are the children, one two three four lined up neatly in a row: the twins weren't born yet, when you realized you hated her. Here is the girl who shines so brightly, clever-tongued and brilliant, flitting from hobby to hobby, taking nothing seriously; who weaves words and careless laughter around your brothers so that Saleh bows and Hamid follows, spiraling deeper and deeper into her orbit. Because when Aziza is around you want her to like you, you don't want her to look at you scornfully and prick you with her tongue, you want to _impress_ her the way she impresses the adults, and you've never been sure whether she does it on purpose. You almost hope she does, that she's as conniving and manipulative as a politician, wrapping everyone she meets into copper-wire jewelry to dangle distracting on her neck, to leave behind at the crime scene so delicately that you don't even realize you've taken the fall for her mistakes. Because here is the alternative: that your sister is simply oblivious. Too self-centered to understand that not everyone can thrive in her shadow. That not everyone can talk themselves out of trouble after leading the boys into it, because here is Saleh who can't say no to anyone and here is Hamid who worships the ground she walks on, and here is Aziza, who may or may not know that both of them would do anything for her but certainly takes advantage of it.

Here is you: practical and responsible, picking up the pieces.

You're just different. Is the thing. You are different the way you and Saleh are different (Saleh is laidback and forgetful and easily persuaded; you keep a calendar written in careful calligraphy on the inside cover of your favourite notebook). You are different the way you and Hamid are different (Hamid likes to dazzle people, talking circles around them, modelling himself after Aziza's easy banter; you lay out charts and graphs and numbers and explain why you're right. Reasonable cop, charming cop: the two of you work well together, when you can pry him away from her side). You are different from Aziza like the turbulent Nile is different from the dead red desert, and you refuse to think about which one of you is which.

(One is full of jackals; the other is full of crocodiles. Does it matter, which ones drown and which ones dessicate? Dead, dead, dead, either way, something dies. You can't both win. Only one of you even knows you're at war.)

When you are thirteen you go to the temple of Persephone and make an offering. You give the goddess all the bitterness, the envy and the anger. You pour out a libation and ask her to calm your soul. You don't want to hate your sister. You don't like the person it makes you, to be cold and jealous and spiteful. You are the practical one, the sensible one, the one who smooths things over and cleans up after your siblings. It's not becoming, it's not right, for you to hate like this.

(Being jealous means she's _won_.)

One cannot pray a lie.

Your offering is not accepted.

Aziza is oblivious. Too convinced of her own vivacity to believe that anyone could hate her. Too charmed by herself to notice the way you curl up into yourself whenever she's around, making unconscious room for her personality. This is how Zizu thinks: Zizu loves Riri, therefore Riri knows Zizu loves her. Zizu does not think to notice that Riri feels small, feels overshadowed, feels like nothing she does can ever compete. (It's not a competition! When did it become a competition?!) Therefore, Zizu does not notice. Therefore, it isn't a problem.

Everything you do, Aziza did first, and better, and was praised for it until there was no praise left for you.

Aziza doesn't see this because she doesn't think to look, and you think it’s for _that_ that you hate her most of all.

Only one of you even knows you're at war. You keep it that way, for the sake of peace; for the sake of your parents, for the sake of your brothers, for the sake of not giving her the satisfaction of having gotten to you.

When you are thirty-one your sister dies, tossed against the wall like a rag doll discarded by a girl who's outgrown them. The grief that wells up in your throat doesn't feel that much different from the tightness of vomiting. You drink tea, gone cold by now and sweetened too much. You never even liked sugar in your tea but Aziza didn't like it either, and you were trying so hard to be different from her, separate, not one-of-the-girls or one-of-the-Tahan-children or Aziza's-little-sister.

You picked _sugar_ in your _tea_ because you could never bring yourself to shout at her, and that's the most pathetic thing you've ever heard of. Mother is crying upstairs. You can hear her.

You're getting a promotion at work. You'll be working directly with Apophis Themself. You were going to tell your parents today. It's exciting, for you at least, the culmination of years of dedication and hard work. You'd hoped to get one of Father's rare, gentle _I'm-proud-of-you_ smiles.

You're drinking cold, sugary tea and Aziza has upstaged you _again_ by fucking _dying_ , and you can't figure out if the sick feeling in your shaking hands is anger at her or at yourself.

You dump the tea down the sink and go lock yourself in the office for a while.

You hate her, you hate her, you hated her, you wish/ed something would happen to knock her down a peg, to knock her head out of her ass, to make her look at you for _once_ only once, to make her _listen_ while you shouted at her to make her _realize_ to make her—

You scream into your blankets.

This wasn't what you meant. This wasn't what you meant. Zizu's dead dead dead and it's not fair that you still hate her. You didn't want this.

They ask you to sing at her funeral.

 **Why?** you ask. **Get one of her bard friends. The professionals.**

(You've never been good at music, not compared to her. You tried to make your peace with that. You _like_ music but it's not _yours_. It can't be yours. It will always be hers. Now more than ever.)

**You're her sister. It will mean more coming from you.**

Maybe this is supposed to be your penance. For hating her. For loving her. For letting her win.

She warps everyone into her orbit, and you always thought you'd escaped— prided yourself on escaping. A sullen, secret satisfaction, that you weren't obsessed with her the way everyone else was.

Here is a secret: the opposite of a thing is just the thing twisted the other way.

And here is a second secret: an opposite carries within itself the seed of what it came from.

Here is the third secret: trying to escape a box tacitly admits the box is there.

The opposite of love is resentment.

(The opposite of resentment is love.)

When you are seventeen, and Zizu is almost twenty, you have your first breakup, the one that will put you off of men forever and scare you away from women for years. She takes you up to the roof and sits you down with a blanket and a cup of hot tea with too much sugar in it and then she kneels behind you and brushes your hair slowly, methodically, the same as her own heartbeat, until you stop crying and wrestle your breathing into matching the strokes.

(She told you once that you had a good voice. She said it honestly, earnestly, matter-of-factly, like it hadn't ever crossed her mind that people compared you to her and found you wanting. She is generous like that. You wonder: if she had noticed you weren't sharing the spotlight maybe she'd have offered to share it herself. It is hard to reconcile that with crocodiles in the water. But you, of anyone, know that people are complicated.

Of course, then she followed it up with an equally matter-of-fact _Actually, Riri, I bet you'd sound even better if you took lessons. I could help you if you like! You ought to learn to breathe properly._

All your charity vanished. You don't remember what you said to her. You do remember her hurt, confused expression.

She was just trying to help.)

You throw a pillow at the wall. Your hands shake to the rhythm of your own heartbeat.

You pick her favourite song, in the end.


End file.
